As someone who doesn’t drive nor own a car in real life, I feel like I’m probably missing something when I play most driving games. I certainly don’t get into the whole tweak this setting to make the car run at 1 horse power over its registered limit so the car goes 3 km/h faster than it normally would. I don’t get making the car look like it’s been thrown up on by an artist with a fetish for plastic airplane wings. What I do like is the sound of the engine and the feel of speed generated by the game. If there is a cop car chase and a cool soundtrack thrown in, then I’m happy.

So I should be delighted with the new Need For Speed. After taking a year off to develop for the new consoles, the Ghost crew working with the Frostbyte Engine have put together a really nice looking game. It’s quite possibly one of the nicest looking games I’ve played in this generation. The environments you drive around are beautiful, although most of the time you’re travelling too fast to notice. The only disappointment is you’re always driving at night. There is a moment where the sky brightens as if it’s going to be dawn, and then dawn never comes, but it’s still beautiful.

The cars themselves are spectacular. There are moments when the FMV cuts from the actors to your car, and it’s near impossible to tell the car is rendered in 3D and not actually there on set. And sound wise, this game pushes all my buttons. The cars sound as good as they look, with the V8s being particularly growly. The music is a cool blend of EDM, newer DnB and some rock, and thankfully not a dubstep track in earshot.

“Wait!?” I hear you cry. “Did you say FMV?” Yes, yes I did. And yes, I mean Full Motion Video, like Night Trap and Mad Dog Mcree, games that came out on Arcade or CD Rom in the early 1990s. And no, this isn’t any better 25 years later. Well, ok, that’s not very fair – they certainly look better as the 3D integration between the actors and non-physical assets is now seamless. This would have been completely shot on green screen, and much like modern movies, it is near impossible to tell what’s real and what’s rendered.

The actors do a valiant job, talking into the camera at “you”, but it feels very amateurish. The script is nonsensical and doesn’t actually contain any coherent story, which means any connection between you and these actors is difficult to form and maintain. There is no plot, no usual story elements, no “bad guys” to battle against. There’s this crew of misfit road racers, and you decide to drive around with them, and there’s kind of a love triangle or hexagon that’s hinted at, and then you meet someone’s idol (who is apparently a real life racing identity – who knew? *shrug*) and race with them, and that’s kind of it. Oh, and fist bumping. So much fist bumping. Every time there is a new scene, there is a fist bump. Every time someone leaves a scene, there is a fist bump. This game should have been called “Need for Fist Bump”.

It seriously baffles me why they decided to go with FMV. I imagine, however, the conversation went a little like this:
Mike: (Management Type Dude) “Holy Fuck, we forgot to include a story! We have Monster product placement but forgot to write a goddamn story for that product placement! John, run out and make some people and scenes for us! Dan, write a story”
Dan: (Lead Designer who once studied English/Journalism) “My job is try to make games fun, not write the story. I don’t know anything about the underground racer scene. I haven’t even seen “Fast and Furious”!
Mike: “It doesn’t need to be War and Peace, Dan, it’s a game about driving fucking fast cars at night. Just copy the F&F synopsis online, but take out the sex and violence… this game needs to be PG. Write it now or we’ll put you back on the match 4 mobile games team.”
Mike: “And put fist bumps in it. Kids love the fist bump.”
John: (Lead Art Producer Type dude) “Mike, we make cars, not people, and you’ve promised another 150 cars for DLC. We don’t have the time nor the team. But we are working with EA, so go get an animation team from another studio to help out.”
Mike: “Shit, we don’t have any animators free – everyone is tied up making Madden 16, Sims 4 and FIFA 16 – it has women in it now you know! Remember what Activision said… it’s TRUE!!”
John: “Damn the FIFA team. Well, shit, I don’t know, get some voice actors or something, and some real car dudes, but we’ll film them on green screen.”
Mike: “Fantastic idea! You’re promoted to Studio Head! Fist bump?”

The driving itself is rather fun, which is good, because at the end of the day, this a driving game, not a fist bump simulator. But let’s get something out of the way first – Need For Speed is an arcade racer. The driving is ‘loose’ and ‘unrealistic’. Your car will slip and slide and turn and do things it probably wouldn’t do in real life or in other car games. It’s meant to be that way and is not, and hopefully never will be, a simulator. Having said this, overall there is a little unresponsiveness when turning that is apparent in all cars. It feels like there is a lag between moving the joystick and the car reacting, and it’s not fixed through tuning the car. It is, however, a minor annoyance that will become less noticeable as you play the game.

Similar to other Need For Speed games, you rack up points when driving, and need these points to pass missions and unlock levels to upgrade your cars. There are a variety of skills which you can score against when driving: Speed, Style, Crew, Build, and Outlaw. Speed is self-explanatory – pull off speed tricks like 0-100 and maintaining your top speed. Style is maintaining good driving lines and drifts around corners. Crew is earned when you drive in concert with your AI opponents, like chain a drift around corners. Build is based on your build, and it’s suitability to the type of race and manoeuvres you pull off. Outlaw is about causing destruction and how long cops will chase you. I really like this system, as it’s fairer to drivers like myself who aren’t always the best drivers, but do enjoy silly things like knocking down street signs.

Points aren’t the only currency to earn in races though. You also earn cash, which is used to purchase new parts or new cars once they’re unlocked by points. It’s important to own at least two cars and get them early, upgrading and tuning them to different specs – one as a drifter to help you slip and slide around corners, and one built for pure speed. I initially wanted to “save” money by only having one car and modding it, but you end up spending more money on tuning and retuning rather than just having two different cars, and there are races which simply cannot be won with the wrong specced car.

The world you inhabit is Ventura Bay, which is apparently based on Los Angeles. I’ve never been to LA, so can’t compare. It does feel very similar to Los Santos though. It’s an always online world, much like Burnout: Paradise City, and you’ll see other players driving about, usually on the map or parked at the garage. We’ll get to more into that in a moment, but apparently a lot of people were bitching about this when it was announced. I don’t understand why, I’ve never had any issues with connection nor drop outs and only once was my experience negatively impacted, when Xbox decided it was time to update in the middle of a race, but that was ultimately my fault.

The entire map is unlocked at the start of the game, so you can drive around to your hearts content. Driving around earns you points just the same as the missions, and although you can always teleport to the missions, I suggest driving to the missions at first to give you some much needed level advancement. The game story is where you earn cash, and designed around five main characters who will fist bump you in the FMV story scenes to give you missions, corresponding to the five styles of driving. For example, Spike is usually represented by a green icon, which is Speed, so most of his missions will be races. Yellow represents Style races. Purple is Build races, so usually you need a specific type of car or motor or mod. Blue is Crew, so these always involve racing in teams, and Red is Outlaw, so usually mean racing causing destruction or with cops chasing you. The characters sometimes shift in what they want you to do, so there’s plenty of variety in the story missions.

Some missions you need to come first in either the race or by amount of points earned, whilst some are there just to further the story and placement doesn’t matter. The ones where you have to earn the highest points are usually quite fun, because it’s all about how well you drive. You make more points drifting in a pack than alone and feel more inclined to take unusual risks, like jump ramps, drive into on-coming traffic, and hand break turns.

The races where you have to win outright are downright annoying, because the rubber banding is extreme. You can be winning by a huge lead and then slow down to avoid a collision, and then be overtaken by not only the second place, but third and fourth. It’s controller throwing frustrating. There’s one race in particular which I’ve found impossible to win, and looking online I’m not the only one. Another annoyance is the other road traffic. There’s not much on the road, which is good, because it’s moronic. It deliberately veers into you and it also glitches – it can appear one moment and disappear the next, meaning you can swerve to miss something which is essentially not there.

I mentioned cop car chases, and they’re quite annoying too. As you break more laws, you rack up a higher fine which you pay on getting caught. The cops will set up road blocks and so on to stop you, which you can normally get away from, until they drop tire spikes, meaning you lose speed and control if you run over them. In free mode, this is fine, because you normally don’t spend a lot of time near the cops to warrant tire spikes, and the cops are stupidly easy to get away from. However, during an Outlaw race, where you have to do the race whilst being chased and rack up lots of Outlaw points, the degree of Outlaw-ness continues after the race. So whilst it’s rare to get tire spikes dropped during the race, after the race when you want to go to the next mission or whatever, there are tire spikes everywhere and you will lose any cash you earned from the race in fines.

I’ve only done one race in multiplayer, and the player took the first turn and glitched out, taking the opponents out with him. I was incredibly grateful to that player, as it was the race I have not won yet… however the extreme rubber banding meant the AI cars came and overtook me at the last corner. If you’re in a story mode race and haven’t opted to race with another player, you appear on the map to them, but you can’t see them. So on the map you’ll see what is clearly a race with the little arrows going around a course, but if you’re in the locality won’t see any cars or players. I guess this is to stop players trolling each other and parking cars along the route, but it’s very odd situation and creates a lack of cohesion between single and multiplayer. If you’re going to do this, why not make a single player and multi-player version of the maps, and allow one to be offline?

Conclusion:
Need For Speed lost its footing some time ago, and is still trying to find it. Whilst the game looks and sounds amazing, and the driving is fun for the most part, there were a lot of odd decisions made with this one – the FMV, the Always Online, Driving at Night, No Weather – which would have been expensive in terms of time and money but don’t really add any value to the game. My advice for the developers is to scale back the game, focus on what made Need For Speed so good back in the day, and forget trying to shoehorn in this and that to appease the masses.

Pros:
Amazing looking game
Great car sounds and good soundtrack.
The points system is far fairer than other driving games
Good variety in types of races / missions

Cons:
Car turning is a little unresponsive / sticky.
Rubber banding is ridiculous
Glitches of cars vanishing
Glitches in multiplayer races

60/100